Saturday, December 11, 2010

The Idler, Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Tale of romantic love

THIS column avoids Mills & Boon style romance, but occasionally a love story comes along that makes the grade.

US comedian Jay Leno had mingled with the audience to discover the most embarrassing first date that a woman ever had. Here is the experience described by the winner.

It was midwinter ... snowing and cold. The date had taken her ski-ing in the mountains outside Salt Lake City, Utah.


It was a day trip. The outing was fun but relatively uneventful until they were headed home late that afternoon.


They were driving back down the mountain when she began to realise she should not have had that extra latte. They were about an hour away from anywhere with a rest room and in the middle of nowhere.

Her companion suggested she try to hold it, which she did for a while. But because of the heavy snow and slow going, there came a point where she told him he had better stop and let her go at the roadside.

They stopped and she crawled out beside the car. In the deep snow she didn't have good footing, so she rested her butt against the rear fender to steady herself.

Her date was a real gentleman. He stood at the side of the car watching for traffic and refrained from peeking.

However, the ordeal of embarrassment was by no means over. The young lady discovered to her dismay that her buttocks were firmly glued against the car's fender, the way tongues get frozen to poles in the North American winter.


Horrified by her plight, she replied to her date's questions as to what was taking so long by saying she was "freezing her butt off" and needed assistance.


He came around the car and they assessed her dilemma. She obviously needed to be unfrozen from the metal. But how?

What had frozen her there in the first place? Her date had to unzip and provide the only warmth available. Soon she was sluiced free.


How did this first date otherwise turn out? He became her husband and was sitting next to her on the Leno show.

They don't tell us anything about the honeymoon.

Weird life

LIFE - but not as we know it - has been discovered by scientists. It is not in some distant galaxy, as so often imagined. "Weird life" microbes have been scooped from the mud at the bottom of Mono Lake, in California. The discovery is said to have huge implications in the search for extra-terrestrial life.

The Mono Lake bugs are able to thrive on arsenic, one of the most deadly substances known to most organisms, and even incorporate it into their DNA, the arsenic displacing phosphorous.

When scientists talk about life they tend to mean "life as we know it" - that is, life based on the biological building blocks found on Earth, of which phosphorous is one.

But some experts have speculated that there may be alternative kinds of life - dubbed "weird life" - elsewhere in the universe.

Dr Felisa Wolfe-Simon, from Arizona State University, who led the US researchers, says: "Our findings are a reminder that life as we know it could be much more flexible than we generally assume or imagine.

"If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven't seen yet? Now is the time to find out."

This is most interesting. Arizona State University need to extend their "weird life" researches to this country. It would be nice to know what makes Comrade Julius tick.

 

Generation gap

A RABBLE-ROUSING poster comes this way:

TEENAGERS – Tired of being harassed by your stupid parents?

ACT NOW!

Move out ... get a job ... pay your own bills.

Do it while you still know everything!

Liquor habit

MORE from Bill Bryson's Bizarre World (Warner Books)

In Boston a thief who couldn't get too much of a good thing was arrested after robbing the same liquor store three times in one day.

Tailpiece

A YOUNG hotshot pilot approaches the airfield for his first night landing. Instead of making the official request to land, he says over the radio: "Guess who?"

The runway lights go out.

Control tower: "Guess where?"

Last word

 

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

GRAHAM LINSCOTT

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